1. Technical Field
The invention relates to the ordering of elements extracted from a database. More particularly, the invention relates to the ordering of displayed elements from a database through the ranking of database elements that are actually selected by a user.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Technological advances have enabled manufacturers to create various small-format personal electronic devices. Some examples are Personal Data Assistants (PDA), Cellular Phones, small-form-factor data entry units, and other small-form-factor communication units.
As the size of these small electronic data devices decreased, the size of the data entry keyboards on the devices shrank. The solution to reducing the keyboard size was to decrease the number of keys on the keyboard. Reducing the number of keys has created several problems. The most obvious is the overloading of keys such as on a cellular phone. A single key may represent several characters. When text is input into a reduced keyboard device, it becomes tedious and difficult for the user to enter any reasonable amount of text. The overloaded keys typically require multiple presses to obtain the correct characters.
Keyboard disambiguating systems such as described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,818,437, 5,953,541, 6,011,554, and 6,286,064 owned by the Applicant solve the text entry problem by processing user keystrokes and forming and presenting words to the user that are associated with the keys pressed. Complete words are presented to the user that begin with the letters represented by the key presses. Presenting a list of words associated with the keys pressed saves the user from entering additional keystrokes to spell an entire word and also saves time. The user simply selects the first word in the list or scrolls down and selects the desired word.
The words that are presented to the user are stored in a vocabulary database. An example of a vocabulary database is described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,818,437, 5,953,541, 6,011,554, and 6,286,064 owned by the Applicant.
Another example is iTap by Motorola, Inc. of Schaumburg, Ill., which performs predictive keypad text entry on cellular phones. The iTap system also displays predicted words to the user. However, iTap does not order the displayed words to the user based on which words were actually used by the user. Such a feature would be extremely helpful to the user to save even more time and enable the user to enter text more quickly and efficiently.
It would be advantageous to provide a dynamic database reordering system that displays words associated with key presses to a user in an order based on the user's actual use of the words. It would further be advantageous to provide a dynamic database reordering system that does not store frequency of use information in the main database.